Publishers Criticize Federal Investment in Open Educational Resources

May 24, 2011, 7:00 pm

San Francisco—What do publishers and software companies think of a $2-billion federal grant program that will support the development of freely available online college courses?

“I think it’s very dangerous for them to be in the product business,” said Bill Hughes, vice president of business development and innovation at Pearson Education.

“There’s no free lunch,” said James Kourmadas, vice president of strategic marketing at McGraw-Hill Higher Education.

“I fear when big bucks from government is put into certain places, it actually stops pushing people to innovate,” said Kevin Wiggen, chief technology officer of Blackboard Xythos.

The criticisms came at a meeting this week of a trade group, the Software & Information Industry Association, where companies discussed in several sessions the implications of the grant program, which is designed to expand job training at community colleges.

Community colleges will be required to make any courses they produce with the grants freely available under a Creative Commons license. Proponents say the program, which will award $500-million this year, could lead to a vast expansion of free online course materials.

But industry officials argued this week that the plan is a wrongheaded use of government money that would “pick winners” in a wide-open market for digital course materials. Several also said they wondered what would happen to the newly created course materials when the federal grant money runs out.

“I think what the industry says is that we don’t see the point in the government collecting up taxpayer money and trying to rebuild an industry from scratch,” said Mr. Kourmadas of McGraw-Hill.

On Tuesday, Karen Cator, director of educational technology at the Department of Education, rejected those ideas. She argued in a panel on open educational resources, known as OER, that the program could benefit companies by providing usable digital course content that they could build businesses around.

“The federal government can put some money into OER,” she said, “but what is much more important is we can help you all in whatever way you need help in opening doors and building global business.”

In an interview after the panel, Ms. Cator said the companies should look at free educational resources as an opportunity, and not a particularly threatening one. “There is such a tiny fraction of the money that is spent on education going into this that I feel like it’s given more credence than it actually needs at this point,” she said.

Community colleges have submitted proposals for the first round of grants, which will be awarded later this year. Ms. Cator emphasized that the grants are primarily designed to support job-retraining programs and that not all of the money will support the development of open educational resources.

But the grants come at a challenging time for textbook publishers, in particular, which have seen print-textbook revenues decline while a model for digital course materials is still emerging. The federal government is seen as an unwelcome new player.

After Ms. Cator spoke, Mark MacCarthy, vice president for public policy at the industry association, released guidelines asking that the government not specify open-source licensing requirements and not directly involve itself in creating course content.

This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.

E-mail

richardtaborgreene

If the measure of great humanities work is taking a very well trodden topic and area and bringing it to life for a different era and age—so that one has the illusion of being right next to lives so different so removed yet so identical and touching—-then this is an author and set of books to celebrate and a lecture to re-see re-hear for decades. I will be there
pjkobulnicky

“…stops pushing people to innovate …”? I have been working with open source software for 15 years and nothing could be further from the truth. Open Source enables innovation and empowers creative solutions. What is indeed at risk is corporate control of, and the ability to make profits from, the creativity of others. You go Dept of Ed.!
http://hiresteve.com/ Steve Foerster

I actually agree that the federal government shouldn’t be in the content creation business. But I’m elated that so many materials will be created by faculty and others at colleges and universities and released to be openly reusable. Commercial publishers have taken a very aggressive posture against us, and it’s time we showed them who needs whom by greatly accelerating the pace at which we develop our own resources and share them openly.

Besides, if the commercial publishers are right that in a few years there will be all these freely reusable resources out there that no one is maintaining, and they can’t think of any way to make money off that, maybe they deserve to go out of business!
http://hiresteve.com/ Steve Foerster

I don’t think there’s any problem with them making money off of free resources, so long as they genuinely add value somewhere along the way. There are plenty of companies that do this with open source software by providing technical support, customization, training, and similar services. The problem is that they do not understand that they need us more than we need them, and are trying to beat us over the head with their copyright entitlements. I mean, why make students pay Pearson sixty bucks for a Calculus or Physics book when they could use Ben Crowell’s excellent free textbooks instead?
11122741

government is already in the product development and content business all over the place; education in the military for example and the tons of products and content developed through NSF and other grants. Some educational products and content need to become commodities such as those related to teaching children (and adults) to read, master the English language, basic math and the basic of science and civics. Basic high quality materials and programs to do these things should be developed through public investment as a national resource like our national parks and made available at very low prices even if subsidized annually. There are several things that people and companies should not be making profits on and big profits in particular.
opencontent

In the 1997 film adaptation of Carl Sagan’s Contact, S. R. Hadden teaches Ellie Arroway “the first rule of government spending: why have one when you can have two for twice the price?”

If only! When it comes to curriculum materials like textbooks, practice exercises, test item banks, instructional videos, and online simulations, our government, universities, and schools are more than happy to pay for them again, and again, and a hundred thousand times again, year after year.

This made sense in the days before the advent of the Internet, when students had to compete for access to educational materials. In those days, if Johnny was using the calculator, Jenny had to wait her turn; if Mary was reading the science book, Mark had to wait his turn. Schools needed to purchase a calculator and a science book for each child in school if they wanted each child to have ready access to these resources.

Since the advent of the Internet, the competitive nature of educational materials has disappeared. While Susie is running calculations in the online chemistry laboratory, another million students are using it too; while Johnny is exploring genetics in the online simulator, another million students are too. It’s just like when you read the news on CNN.com while a million other people do, too – we don’t have to wait our turn for the newspaper any more.

An online educational resource is different from a physical educational resource because every student can use the same online resource at the same time. We don’t need to buy a copy for every student in the nation / state / school – one copy is enough for everyone! Yet despite this fact, schools in the state still enter into contracts with commercial online curriculum providers that require them to pay for a “copy” for each and every student. What a waste!

But it gets worse. In the past we took some solace after paying the huge bill for all those calculators and textbooks in knowing that, once we paid for them, third graders could use them for many years to come, or undergraduates could sell them back. Unfortunately, commercial curriculum providers don’t sell ebooks or online curriculum materials – they rent them to schools and students, generally on a one-year contract. This means that in addition to paying for tens of thousands of copies when only one copy would suffice, we pay for permission to use each of these copies again next year, and pay for them all again the next year, and then again the next…

These commercial online curriculum licenses are perhaps the single biggest waste of taxpayer dollars in all of government spending, and that’s really saying something. Our students and schools pay for tens of thousands of copies, and pay for them again and again, year after year, when simply producing one copy owned by the public would suffice.

Commercial online curriculum providers understand the new economics of creating and distributing digital content via the Internet – that you can create one copy and sell access to it millions of times with no reproduction, warehousing, or shipping costs. These commercial providers take lucrative advantage of the fact that our governments, universities, and school districts do not understand these new economics. And it’s their prerogative to continue to pillage the villagers as long as we remain ignorant.

Rather than remain in the dark about the new economics, our governments, universities, and school districts should do their homework, wise up, and use taxpayer dollars to create a collection of online educational resources that the public can pay for once and then own and reuse indefinitely. Understanding and leveraging these new economics to the public’s advantage will save our cash-starved education systems a significant amount of money that can be redirected to other worthy areas.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) provide an excellent model. Some years ago they recognized that because taxpayers pay for the research they fund, the results of that research should be freely available to the public. Under the old paradigm, taxpayer money went to NIH, which funded research, which was then published in copyrighted journals, which universities and others had to pay to read. So taxpayers actually paid for this research many times over – once to fund it, and then again and again for every public education institution in their state who subscribed to the journals. And the public still had no access to those research results (since the vast majority of the public are not affiliated with a university).

Rather than continue to waste taxpayer dollars so egregiously, paying for research several times over, the NIH Public Access Policy (which became official in April 2008, also known as the “NIH mandate”) now states that each and every one of the final, peer-reviewed journal manuscripts reporting NIH funded research must be placed in a publicly accessible (free) digital archive (see http://publicaccess.nih.gov/). As a consequence, taxpayers no longer pay multiple times over for access to the results of research they funded in the first place.

Education should take the same path. Any and all curriculum materials whose development is funded with taxpayer dollars should be freely and openly available to the public. We paid for them, they belong to us, and it is nothing short of stupid for a university or school district to pay for them a second, third, or 500,000th time. Publicly-funded educational materials should belong to the public, and there is no reasonable justification for claiming otherwise. Congrats to the Department of Education for getting this right, and here’s to the rest of government following their enlightened lead!
ahrashb

It is revealing to look at this statement from SIIA’s VP of public policy, where he is “asking that the government not specify open-source licensing requirements and not directly involve itself in creating course content.” Imagine using that same sentence for other public infrastructural goods, like roads: “We are asking that the government not specify that public roads must be open to the public and not directly involve itself in the building and maintenance of roads.” If there was no government involvement in these things, they simply would not exist at sufficient scale and quality to operate, as these industries well know since nearly all of their current profits are derived from taxes. There must be public investment, so the only question is whether the public sees direct and ongoing benefit. Would we be comfortable with a world where we had to pay on a per-use basis for every road we drive on, knowing full well that we already paid for the roads through our taxes? With the possible exception of high-maintenance (e.g., bridges) or value-added (e.g., express lane) roads, where tolls might be reasonably collected, I doubt it. Yet this is precisely where we stand in educational publishing today.

Note that no one is saying that all of this stuff is magically created for free. There are expenses that require funding for both creation and maintenance. But the way we currently manage these cost structures is wrong. Mandating public access to publicly funded materials is a good first step to fixing the system.
student_advocate

OpenCourseWare is the way of the future and may save this Nation. McGraw-Hill and Pearson have entered into the federally funded for-profit college business that threatens to destroy the nation.

http://www.geeksugar.com/Free-Online-Classes-16688740
RWEJD

The $2B grant from government is a great idea for students, instructors, taxpayers, and society *if* the content and courseware created gets *used*, and matches the quality produced by professional, commercial publishers. To date, that is not even nearly the case.

Over the last decade The Hewlett Foundation (primarily, with others, like Gates) has spent well over $100M to create open content, and courseware. What’s the outcome of that investment? How much of that content was developed in a way that guarantees quality, interoperability, currency, etc. What plans are in place that make the many Open content repositories fiscally sustainable over the long term? How could this much money be spent with so little in the way of positive results?

There are even officials within DOE who consider the current Open content scene lacking in quality, simply “not good enough”.

btw, Gates is looking for a way to leverage commercial publishing interests (see: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/27/gates-education-games_n_854431.html). Here, some percentage of development will go into “free” deployment, with the rest managed by Pearson.

Poorly vetted Open content; the lack of Open content interoperability; difficult to find Open content; poor Open content accessibility for the physically challenged; far too difficult interfaces to Open content repositories (discouraging participation), and so on – all a direct result of *not* including the commercial sector in the creation and deployment of content.

Over years, academic institutions that have been so generously funded to create Open content, have assumed the idea that “we can be publishers, too”. Well, they’re not! They don’t have the skill sets necessary to pull it off – i.e. the marketing insights; the packaging skills; the technology chops; the ability to create Open content publish models that are blatantly self-sustainable; the ability to leverage content into new tech-based modalities; and so on. Again, the skill sets necessary for successful development of Open content *do not* reside within the academic (or academic based) organizations that have been funded over the last decade to make Open content and courseware a viable entity – an entity that fulfills all the promises and advantages that David Wiley list in his post, below.

If the non-profit Open content players want to succeed in a way that delivers the full promise of Open content, they are going to have to employ publishing professionals. Currently, that’s not happening. The entire enterprise is filled with well-meaning and dedicated individuals who mostly have no idea how to properly filter, vet, develop, deploy, and maintain content and courseware that is interoperable within devices and platforms, fiscally sustainable, universally accessible, and kept current. That’s the current record, after $100M spent.

Of course, the current well-known non-profit players within the Open content arena are gong to have “first dibs” on much of the well-intended $2B issued by DOE/DOL. That’s unfortunate.

Here’s a prediction: Until the current flock of non-profit Open content groups begin to hire educational publishing professionals to *run and operate* their Open content publishing initiatives, we will not see sustainable models, or even great content, as a result. That may sound like heresy, but that’s the reality. To anyone who wants to argue this point, my retort is “after a dozen years and well over $100M in funding, where’s the beef?”. We need to keep in mind that $100M is enough to start, from beginning to end, a publishing company that could *easily* begin an enterprise that could over time compete on an equal footing with any one of the commercial giants, in a sustainable way *if* it was run an operated by dedicated, motivated educational publishing professionals.

Instead, what we’re about to do is use $2B in tax dollars to have a ton of barely good enough content developed by well-meaning amateurs. The best of that content will be taken up by commercial publishers, developed and marketed to a standard that meets the exacting demands of teaching academics (including the best online venues). Why go that route? Why should we develop inferior content and count on the professionals to take the best of that inferior content for eventual use?

Let’s use our taxpayer money wisely; let’s demand that the *very best and most skilled* educational publishing professionals are in charge of and operable within the institutions that are funded to develop Open content and Open courseware. There is no excuse for anything less.
http://www.facebook.com/kwiggen Kevin Wiggen

I would like to clarify the comment from me in this post, which was taken from a panel discussion I was participating in. I’m actually very supportive of the OER movement, and find the Khan Academy a great OER innovator. My comments yesterday, in context, were about the ways that federal funding can be used to foster greater attention to and investment in innovation and interoperability. A great example is the open education standards movement, which can help to support the OER movement by making it easier for educators and institutions to share and exchange content. That’s an area that Blackboard is investing heavily in, and that’s what my comments on the panel were focused on. So I wanted to make it clear here to avoid the interpretation that we’re not fully supportive of the OER effort.
http://tomcaswell.com/ tom4cam

RWEJD, I agree with your last statement: “Let’s use our taxpayer money wisely.” Now, a few questions:
1. Is it wise to rent when you can own for less?
2. Is it wise to pay $10 billion every year for K-12 textbooks if taxpayers could pay for them once plus a small annual amount to keep them up-to-date?
3. Is it wise to continue with a copyright model that reserves all the rights for publishers when there are new models that allow for upan access and sharing of materials?

Publishers can still play. They should be allowed to respond to the open textbook RFPs like anyone else. They will be paid well for their services, and when the job is done they will be required to attach an open, shareable license to their work. So, yes, publishers can still play. They just don’t get to make the rules anymore.

US taxpayers pay roughly $10 billion every year for K-12 textbooks. 50% of US college students take out federal loans to pay for another $10 billion in college textbooks. So it’s fair to say that taxpayer money pays for most of that $20 billion. This is not a debate about quality. It’s a question of efficiency.

The Department of Defense’s Open Technology Development report contains an analogy that is relevant to this discussion:
“Imagine if only the manufacturer of a rifle were allowed to clean,
fix, modify or upgrade that rifle. The military often finds itself in
this position with taxpayer funded, contractor developed software: one
contractor with a monopoly on the knowledge of a military software
system and control of the software source code…. This is optimal only
for the monopoly contractor, but creates inefficiencies and
ineffectiveness for the
government, reduction of opportunities for the industrial base, severely
limits competition for new software upgrades, depletes resources that
can be used to better effect and wastes taxpayer-provided funds.”

No one should be surprised to see publishers taking a strong stand against all of this. But let’s all remember that publishers are a means to an end. This is really about providing educational opportunity to students in the best, most efficient way possible.
http://twitter.com/Mackiwg Wayne Mackintosh

UNESCO’s World Conference on Higher Education projects that post-secondary education will need to provide places for an additional 98 million learners over the next 15 years. Stated differently, this would require more than four major universities (30,000 students) to open every week for the next fifteen years.

An international group of taxpayer funded post-secondary institutions are collaborating to provide free learning opportunities for all students worldwide. This OER tertiary education network will provide a stairway to credible credentials for learners based solely on OER.

As educators, we joined the profession for the purpose of sharing knowledge freely and we aim to make education more affordable for the majority of learners, especially those who are currently excluded from the formal system. We want to avoid scenarios where taxpayers are required to pay twice for their learning materials. We now have the technology, legal tools and commitment to do this.

We extend an open invitation to the publishing industry to join us. We are not opposed to the rights of individuals to earn a living. If the publishing industry is able to produce OER faster, cheaper and better quality than what we are able to do in the formal education sector — then publishers will have market advantage. It’s called competition in the free market system.

OER is the means by which education at all levels can be more accessible, more affordable and more efficient. I hope the publishing industry will join us in nurturing the development of more sustainable education futures.
RWEJD

Mr. Mackintosh, How can commercial publisher join with the Federal government if all materials are mandated as requiring completely open (CC-BY-SA) licenses. How would a for-profit organization be able to recoup its investment in a case like that? You know and I know and the commercial publishers know that that is not going to happen. Instead, what will happen is that half-baked content and courseware will be constructed by well-meaning, dedicated persons who have little or no experience in educational publishing. And, we will end up with the same poor results that we have seen over the last decade.

Commercial publishers have been on a feeding frenzy of easy profit taking for years, causing more than their share of pain to students, taxpayers, and academic institutions. One thing: they do know how to make great content. So, why not “borrow” or “hire” some of the best talent from that sector to make world-class Open content?

The fact is that this grant is *already* being spoken about in a way that would permit academic institutions and academic-related institutions to create Open content and Open courseware, with commercial publishers picking up the best of those creations for *professional development and support* once the academic Open-content developers complete their work. That is not doing justice to the size of this grant, nor to the taxpayers who are funding it.

Again, I repeat my question – made below – “Following $100M+ spent on Open content and Open courseware during the last decade, what are the results – i.e. where’s the beef?

I am a very strong supporter of Open licensing, and favor the DOE/DOL grant; it’s a great idea. That said, I am afraid that we are going to get “more of the same” from this new investment. There is simply not sufficient *professional* publishing skill extent in the organizations that are asking for this money.

What have we seen as the result of the last $100M spent? A hodgepodge of Open content repositories that are hard to use; that have not been able to conjure sustainable business models (solutions to sustainability exist, but they are policy based and largely out of the control of Open repositories); that are non-interoperable; that do not maintain fully developed, fully supported, easily updated content. Not to mention that the content so far located and/or created is largely of questionable quality when compared to professionally developed educational content.

This is not to indict the many well-meaning academics and others who have been developing Open content and courseware over the last years; rather it’s to point out that there is something missing in the current formula. Should an editor from Pearson or McGraw Hill or Wiley who understands a little math teach an algebra class at John’s Hopkins? Of course not. This begs the question about why we don’t have more professionals with high level publishing experience involved in these Open content and courseware efforts.

Sure, over time, eventually, after many starts and stops and vetting and re-vetting of content *maybe* we will have Open content arrays that meet requirements stated above, but why are we not looking at the best way, the best path forward – i.e. bringing seasoned publishing professionals in to run these grant-based Open content and Open courseware operations.

It’s very, very disheartening and discouraging to see the waste that has resulted from past grants – both foundation and government-based. It is angering to consider that if those projects were run by educational publishing professionals in years past, we *would already have a viable Open textbook and courseware enterprise*. The delays caused by the poor execution of prior grants means that tens-of-thousands of students have had to endure high textbook costs. Many of those students have either dropped out of college, or failed to matriculate, because they can’t afford textbooks. How can we continue, in good conscience, to stay on the same failed path that we have been on for the last 10 years?

What this boils down to is institutional politics, with the same institutions that have largely failed over the last decade having an inside track on the grant funds. What this also boils down to is whether the grantor (DOE/DOL) will *insist* that the most qualified educational publishing professionals be hired into the academic and academic-related institutions to run these grants, with real authority to guide them to successful execution. This means *strict* quality and output milestones that only someone(s) who know what they are doing can carry off. Creating high quality educational content is not a game for well-meaning amateurs. It’s about sophisticated questions of technological interoperability; it’s about effectively “selling” the idea of Open content use; it’s about creating sustainable financial models, etc. The very *last* thing that we should permit is another decade of well-meaning efforts by highly-dedicated amateurs creating half-baked results in the world of Open content and courseware construction. There is simply too much at stake.
http://twitter.com/Mackiwg Wayne Mackintosh

The result of the +100M investment in OER is considerable. It is fuelling the most significant transformation in higher education since the invention of the Gutenberg printing press. Namely, shifting the freedom and autonomy to create culture and knowledge to the creator — and not the distributor. Through open content licensing this is done in a way which doesn’t preclude distributors from doing this cheaper, faster and better than the rest of us.

We are now returning to the core values of the academy — that is to share knowledge freely. Fortunately, we are fast learners and producing quality is not the exclusive province of the distributor.
RWEJD

“shifting the freedom and autonomy to create culture and knowledge to the creator–and not the distributor.” hyperbole is a wonderful thing, don’t you think, Mr. Mackintosh?

“We are now returning to the core values of the academy — that is to share knowledge freely. ”
Freely? Really? Tell me more about how “free” the academy is to most students, today? Sure, we can talk about “free” and “sharing” as principled academic philosophies, but niceties just won’t cut it any more. The academy is in trouble – deep trouble. Trouble brought about by its own hubris, and general failure to meet the real demands of a new generation of students.

Back to the current discussion: What is the source of most educational content? Academic instructors and the academy. How does the latter’s content get developed, distributed, and made interoperable/sustainable – and by the way, generate a profit for the creator? Educational publishers. Thus, academic instructors and institutions have profited from the past abuses brought by egregious pricing tactics. No? Ironic, isn’t it? Please don’t paint commercial publishers as the Big Bad Wolf; there has been plenty of complicity from the academic side to go around. There still is.

Wayne, 11 years and $100M is a long time and a lot of money; the current results of that $100M spend put into doubt your claim about the current crop of academy-based Open content collectors being “fast learners”. Educational publishing is a complex enterprise-based skill set. It’s the current hubris within the academy that keeps academic institutions believing that they can equal the comprehensive quality brought by educational publishers. They can’t, because it’s not what they know.

What I find most galling about the current scene is that there is no way that the twain wants to meet. Educational publishers and the academy seem intent on *not* cooperating in productive ways toward the creation of high quality Open educational content. I know several seriously talented educational publishers who would give their eye teeth to run a massive grant program that churns out the same high quality educational content as the commercial publishers they work for today – and make the Open content within that enterprise sustainable. With the kind of money floated from DOE/DOL, why isn’t the academy looking seriously into this option? Or, is the academy more interested in continuing to feed at the trough of Federal grant money to keep itself going. Something is wrong – very wrong, with the current scene.

This is not only about quality, Mr. Mackintosh, it’s about a complex infrastructure that needs to be in place to make high quality content, first of all – and then make that content usable, and sustainable. The academy is not designed for that. Name just one self-sustainable Open content archive. Just one. After 11 years. How many *high quality* textbooks with supplements have been created, are interoperable, 100% editable, self-sustainable, and easily found?

About the core values of the academy; your statement is pregnant with irony because the application of Open licensed textbooks and courseware within traditional educational circles, combined with the atoms-to-bits distribution model made possible by the Internet, are going to radically disrupt the academy. That’s where this is headed. It can’t happen soon enough – for students, for the taxpayer, and for our society. Open education – truly Open education, minus the boat anchor of the academy, is just around the corner.
RWEJD

Tom,

I am an ardent supporter of the OER movement. Please don’t misread my comments as anything other than hard-hitting constructive criticism. It’s hard-hitting because there has been too much soft-pedaling around the lack of high quality execution relative to the investments made. That should not have happened, and we don’t want to see it continue to happen.

You say commercial publishers can still play. Sure, they can respond to RFP’s but unlike the academic-based groups that are competing for those RFP’s, the commercial publishers have to make a profit. That’s one of the reasons why textbook prices are so egregiously. There are one or two new commercial publishers that are playing in the Open license space, but one must note that their licenses are not completely Open; there’s a reason for that. Commercial publishers have to find some way to protect their investment; completely Open licenses forbid that.

There may be some publishing models that will evolve to wrap high quality services around high quality content – using content as a loss-leading lever to drive profit. We’ll probably see some of those ideas coming from the large commercial publishers, sooner or later.

To reinforce a point I made a few minutes ago, to Wayne Mackintosh; publishers *and* academic authors have profited *together* within the current model. This is not just about the “Big Bad Publishers”. Sure, they make the bulk of the profit, but they have had help from the “inside”. Let’s not kid ourselves.

I am in full agreement with you about the egregious nature of current cost to taxpayers re: textbooks. So, why would you not be in full agreement with me re: having the Feds insist that these Open content publishing efforts be run by those most qualified to create world-class content – i.e., the best publishing professionals our tax money can buy?

Again, I am an ardent supporter of Open source. Dis amateur programmers create Linux, or other widely used Open software and operating systems? Of course not. Open source siftware did not have the luxury of government funding. Open content does. We need to bring the best talent to make sure we’re getting our money’s worth, instead of feeding programs and instutions that have heretofore failed to execute. That may sound harsh, but that’s the way it is. The current crop of Open content repositories and creators (and, they’re mostly repositories – as most Open content is just not first-rate; nor, has it been created by the current crop of Open content grantees. Instead, it’s mostly recycled content that is offered up piece by piece and hard to find, or content that couldn’t cut it in the marketplace when put head-to-head against the best high quality commercial content.

you write: “No
one should be surprised to see publishers taking a strong stand against
all of this. But let’s all remember that publishers are a means to an
end. This is really about providing educational opportunity to students
in the best, most efficient way possible.”

We’re in complete agreement – assuming you and DOE/DOL put the *best talent money can buy* working to use our taxpayer dollars to achieve the goals in your statement, above. Why aren’t we insisting on that? I, for one, will be very incensed of some years hence we end up with more of the same hodgepodge of medium quality, non-interoperable, lacking currency, and unsustainable content that currently lives in richly funded Open content repositories and other Open content plays. Are we serious about the following goal, as you state: “This is really about providing educational opportunity to students
in the best, most efficient way possible.”. If we are we need to have the best and most qualified people in place to make that happen. Currently, that’s not the case.
bhughes316

This is a terrific discourse, even if it was motivated by some faulty reporting. I was at the panel where this was discussed, and there was no disdain from commercial publishers for OER, but rather a recognition that it could play an important role in driving innovation in the sector and meeting needs that commercial providers don’t. Without a clear understanding of the full costs of what publishers do, though, the risk is that the public thinks it is getting free beer, and it gets a free puppy instead.

But controversy sells, I guess…
cable_green

(1) The US Federal Government has, for decades, provided grants to higher education to produce new research and educational content. To say it is “dangerous for [the Federal Government] to be in the product business” is irrelevant. The Department of Labor (DOL) is exercising rational, responsible public policy that more efficiently uses public tax dollars to improve educational opportunities.

The DOL has put forth a simple, effective public policy: Taxpayer-funded educational resources should be open educational resources.

Open educational resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or re-purposing by others.

Information that is designed, developed and distributed through the generosity of public tax dollars should be accessible to the public that paid for it — without undue restrictions or
limits.

If you think about this open policy, it makes sense. We, the American taxpayers, should get what we paid for.

(2) Karen Cator is correct: the commercial publishers (textbook, journals, etc.) should be embracing and supporting this new public policy. When publicly funded digital content (courses, textbooks, data, research, etc.) is openly licensed with a CC BY license — http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0 — everyone can use and modify the open content to meet their needs — including the commercial publishers.

Moreover, the CC BY license does not restrict commercialization of the open content. To be clear, the commercial publishers can take all $2B of content created in this DOL grant, change it, make it better, add value, and sell it. The consumer (states, colleges, students) will then have a choice: (a) use the free openly licensed version(s) or (b) purchase the commercial for-a-fee version. If the commercial content / services are worth paying for, people will pay. If not, they won’t.

Next step? We should applaud the Departments of Labor and Education for their work
and encourage all US Federal agencies to follow suit: require CC BY licenses on all content produced with federal funding.

Cable Green
Director of Global Learning
Creative Commons
http://tomcaswell.com/ tom4cam

(reposting comment from Thursday — it was omitted for some reason)

RWEJD,

I appreciate your criticisms. I take a fairly practical approach to
the open licensing of educational content, and I see no reason to
exclude publishers from this discussion. Should the government require
an open license on all these materials? Absolutely.

What publishers are experiencing is a sped-up version of the
disruption that occurred to icemen with the invention and spread of
electric refrigerators. Some in the ice delivery industry made the
transition to selling refrigerators and some did not, largely because
some were focused on keeping food cool and others were only focused on
selling ice.

If Pearson won’t take $X million to create an openly licensed, high
quality Human Anatomy textbook, maybe Soomo will. Open licensing means
the publisher will need to learn to do business differently. Open licensing is a game changer, a much-needed efficiency, and it is here to stay.

The Open Course Library is an interesting hybrid in this open
educational content experiment. I work in a system that serves nearly
500,000 community and technical college students in the state of
Washington. A carefully selected group of our best faculty are
currently drawing from the world’s OER materials to produce open
(CC-BY) digital curriculum for 81 of our highest enrolling courses. We
are doing this with the assistance of talented librarians,
accessibility experts, and instructional designers who are Quality
Matters Master Reviewers. Our attempt is not perfect, but it is a
strong one, and I expect others will build on it. The project is
described at http://opencourselibrary.org.

The Open Course Library has not closed the door on publishers, but
it does require them to work with pricing limits aimed at driving down
the cost of textbooks. Many have responded. Several Open
Course Library courses use texts from Cengage, Pearson, McGraw-Hill,
and Flat World Knowledge. Their materials are not free or open, but we have required them to be offered to the world (not just our system) for less than $30 US, and are paired with open curriculum. This is
how our system is pulling together the best OER, identifying any gaps, and working with low cost commercial materials until more high quality,
open, shareable, free textbooks are made available.
http://twitter.com/skydaddy Corrie Bergeron

A little late to this conversation, though I saw the original post on a local email list this week and responded there.

@bhughes316, the free puppy / free beer analogy applies in some fields, but not all. What annual updates are there (really) to Algebra, Calculus, or the History of Western Civilization? Yet publishers force students to buy new (not used!) editions every other year.

@RWEJD:disqus makes some very cogent points, especially regarding interoperability (hello, folks – IEEE1484, anyone? Anyone? Beuller?)

But…

On the scale of US government spending, $100M is very nearly a rounding error. NASA spent more than twice that much for a launch tower for the now-canceled Ares rocket.

Yes, $100M was the market cap of PLATO when I worked there in the mid-to-late 90′s. But that was a publicly-traded company controlled by MBAs with a clear market and profit motive, as opposed to a loose collection of universities, colleges, and departments controlled by Ph.D.s whose market is ill-defined and constantly shifting, who are new (and usually hostile) to the idea of treating education as a business, and who are waking up from a long sleep of freely-flowing funding to new and harsh fiscal realities.

As to high-quality, easily-found, editable, open resources, Google this phrase: “free college algebra textbook” Stitz and Zeager didn’t even use IEEE1484 metadata. Google’s getting pretty smart.

@tom4cam:disqus made the same point I did in my response to the list – the publishers need to realize that they’re in the business of creating content, not printing books. Newspapers got that wake-up call a few years ago. It’s been painful and ugly for the ones who have not been able to adapt.

And as @wayne macintosh pointed out, these are still early days for Open Content. Just as with the dawn of the automobile, the airplane, and the moving picture, there will be slow and incremental progress (punctuated by the Great Leap of Insight) together with wasted effort and spectacular crashes.

Except that it will all happen at Web 2.0 speeds.
jackyhood

Government has a place in educational resources. That place is enforcement of copyrights including open licenses. Taking money from citizens and buying OER from academics is the antithesis of the concept of open. Open licensing is about sharing. Forcing people from all walks of life to pay for the creation of educational materials is the opposite of sharing. To add insult to injury, the $2B came from pushing the banks out of the student loan business and taking it over by the government. The $2B should be given back to the taxpayers and they should choose how to spend it. Some will choose education. Some will spend it on beer and NASCAR races; this riles the PhDs who think they have the right to rule others. Education is far too important to be the province of government. With the power to tax and to choose what gets produced, all other players will be eliminated.
egozaydin

$ 2 Billion is the greatest opportunity World has. ( Not only USA but wholoe world will benefit )
I just do not understand people in the USA.
You do not know what the online is. But fortunately Obama understands.
He said 8 months ago at Carnegie Mellon regarding online the greatest thing in the world.

S   H   A    R    E

ONline is for share. It can be shared by 60,000,000 K12 + 18,000,000 College students + many adults.

If Federal Government finance online courses develoment, that is the greatest thing in the world.

Some agengy, government or some consortium of universities and Pearson and a like come together   and design the best online courses in the world for K12 and university .

Then everybody can use it . For sustainability   I recommend a $ 10 per course fee .

Why publishers are disturbed. Reason is they will have less businesses .
If technology forces you will be . Look how film industry became jobless due to digital cameras .
Puıblishing will be also extinct in short a while .

Let us use this greatest opportunity for the world.

Use $ 2 billion for the development of online courses for USA +world education for 200,000,000 people .

Thanks to OBAMA bilion times.

Find the best developers in the world for all subjects necessary .
mgozaydin@hotmail.com from Turkey
egozaydin

If 200,000,000 students in the world take only 1 online course ( if you charge $ 10 per course ) it makes $ 2 billion in only one year.
That is the biggest business for publishers. Please do not miss the opportunity .
egozaydin

Dear opencontent :

You are right.

ONLINE Education is much different than physical f2f education.

Duplication , multiplication does not cost any thing .
One online course can beb followed by one person or 10,000,000 persons no cost is involved.

Pubklishers make money from just multiplication of issues. 10,000 books then 20,0000 books etc.

This is greatest opportunity for the world.

Let some agency

government+universities+publishers+ unesco + best educators of the world+ best IT people of the world

come together and develop the best online courses for the USA and for the world.

Then if you charge only $ 10 per course you can make a huge money as well .
rich_hershman

That is a little self serving don’t you think? Creative Commons has been lobbying federal and state governments to make it the official license model. That is reflected in CC public comments on several request for comments. This is not to put down in any way Creative Commons and the value it has brought to the table and the void it has filled between copyright and public domain, but why mandate a specific license program from a specific organization. Maybe there are other license models or standards that will emerge. Maybe some government developed or supported content should just be public domain as it has been done long before Creative Commons was formed. Rather than prescribe a specific license category produced by an independent non-government entity that is not accountable to taxpayers, the government should specify what content is covered and how it may be used and made available. Suggesting Creative Commons as an example yes, mandating a specific organization’s licensing model, no.
nmireles

True. I actually foresee publishers being “creative” enough to take advantage of this.

They will confirm the principles of freedom to reuse, readapt, remix, etc. of OER.

Publishers business model, just as HEIs teaching model, are over as we know them.